Edtech zombies may live out there somewhere, but are oft forgotten, maybe now arising out of some obscure LLM garbling, but heck, research papers can summon them too.
Who better to shine a light in the creepy fields than Stephen Downes? His March 1o OLDaily post surfaced Open Education Is the New Punk: A Subversive Do-It-Yourself Approach to Pedagogy an Open Praxis published piece in at least tone I can appreciate:
This study explores how learners in open education engage with alternative pedagogical practices informed by subcultural values and punk-inspired do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches. While open and distance education has expanded globally, little is known about how learners assert agency, reconfigure authority, and foster community through self-directed, non-institutionalized models. To address this gap, the research investigates four core questions concerning learner autonomy, networked collaboration, subversive learning, and digital identity formation. It adopts a qualitative design based on semi-structured interviews with participants from interdisciplinary backgrounds in Türkiye who actively engaged in open programs.
https://openpraxis.org/articles/10.55982/openpraxis.18.1.945
Wow, indeed, the edupunk spirit emerges from the ground in Türkiye! Or least within 22 students in this study (and yes the author dutifully notes the sample size) that has all the propoer pieces of research…. except background.
You hardly need GenAI to find the source info in Wikipedia, with of course Jim Groom’s still beautiful blog post featuring his marker written knuckles (and yes, WordPress hoodie). And of course Stephen was early on it too (noting his reference to BlogHer post by Leslie Madsen-Brooks, someone I hope is well these days, its been forever) — and of course making the statement “And that’s the entire world literature on ‘edupunk’ to date.”
How could that have been missed?
I will put my stake in the game too from a 15 minute mockumentary I create for actually an invited presentation on edupunk at the 2015 CIINOVApp conference at the University of Guadalajara.
I am pretty damn proud of how far I pushed iMovie to make this “film” which references with an actual photo of the night Jim and Brian Lamb brainstormed this at a New York Bar.
I was able to “film” video with Brian in his office when I was on a fellowship with him at Thompson Rivers University and Jim recorded over ?? Google Hangouts?? from his patio in Italy. I was doing the motif I did for the whole You Show series I did with Brian where I would give my film subjects a sketchy description of a plot, and we would record it in a one take improv.
They nailed it, and I say so even more re-watching the whole things again 11 years later. The middle part has the obscure episode of Quincy where the doctor faced off with the social phenomena of edupunk (actually the episode was about punk music, can you believe that?). I smiled hearing Tannis Morgan and Brian’s son Harry doing the voiceovers.
Our UDG colleague we got to know through the Agora project, Jorge Yahuaca recorded the Spanish narration that had English subtitles in the opening. I would guess I had help from masybe Tannis or Ken Buaer with translating the script I wrote into Spanish.
But that’s just the video, it was part of a presentation I was part of with Brian and Tannis, delivered with my fun WordPress theme for presentations that still works a decade plus later, SPLOTPoint — the talk was called Edupunk, EduBauhaus, D.I.O?
Because it is a presentation done on and of the web, it’s chock full of edupunk references that are apparently elusive. What I had lost track of, was that the idea of edupunk was well known and practiced bby educators across Latin America (nearly all the references came from Brian and his connections from travels to South America).
10+ years before it crawled out of the ground in Türkiye.
I am not really criticizing the paper (which I skimmed with human eyes) and I actually applaud the raising the spirit of DIYism in students. Especially now as what is being passed for and celebrating the “D” is chucking text into a box and clicking as button.
I also claim no scholarly or cultural expertise in punk or edupunk, I was just there at the time.
At a time when we built things, and crafted things, and mocked things, and connected things. It was real.
Long die edupunk.
Featured Image: Merged frames of my own video EDUPUNK: de dónde viene y hacia dónde se dirige ahora (YouTube)
